Archive for the ‘Online Scholarly Resources’ Category

TL;DR Version (skip to the long version if you like storytelling and don’t want spoilers):

For a given Jacoby citation in the format (example) 3F11, parse as follows:

3 is the author number. Each author has a unique number. There is an author index in the original print set, in volume III, part C, pp. 947-64, if you know the author’s name but not the number. The authors appear in the print volumes in numerical order (depending on your binding, the author numbers in a given book may well be printed on the spine. Author 3 is in the very first book in the set, natch, following authors 1 and 2.)

F is for fragment; T is for testimonial. Once you find the section on a given author, the fragments appear before the testimonia.

11 is the number of the fragment being cited. These appear in numerical order in the print volumes, so 3F11 will follow 3F10 and precede 3F12.

The Long Version

The origin of this post was a plea by IM from a librarian friend who was staffing the chat reference service at an academic library. A student had the citation “3F11″ and the knowledge that this referred to Jacoby’s Fragmente Der Greichischen Historiker (usually abbreviated FGrH, so the student had probably already done some work before turning to a librarian.) My friend was able to tell the student that their institution owned the print volumes (WorldCat), although they did not have access to the digital version available through Brill, and that it was a 15-volume set, but the student really wanted a volume and page number.

My friend was hopeful that F stood for “fascicle” and that 3F11 somehow meant volume 3, fascicle 11, and then some unknown page. Jacoby citations are not that straightforward, though; the work is tricky enough to use that a three-volume freestanding index was published by P. Bonnechere in 1999 (WorldCat). In his 2000 review at BMCR, J. Marincola explained the difficulties:

… although a masterpiece, FGrHist has never been an easy work to use. Jacoby insisted on a peculiar arrangement by sub-genres of historical writing (as he conceived them). This by itself would have been difficult, but it was then further complicated by a concession to practicality, namely, an arrangement by author rather than by individual work. And yet if an author wrote works in a variety of (Jacoby’s) sub-genres (as many did), he could, nevertheless, appear in only one section. Jacoby seems to have decided what work of the author was most important and then assigned him to the category that best described that work. So, for example, Arrian wrote a Parthika (on Rome’s wars with Parthia from the first century BCE to his own time) and a Bithyniaka (a history of his homeland Bithynia), but he is to be found amongst the historians of Alexander’s Successors — no doubt because his Affairs after Alexander is his most important (i.e., for us) fragmentary work. Before the volumes under consideration here, the only help we have had in using FGrHist has been an alphabetical list of authors at the end of III.C., pp. 947-64 …

If either the student or the librarian had been standing in front of the print volumes, this problem of “what does 3F11 mean?” would have been pretty easy to solve. I found out that 3 was the ‘author number’ via the review of the index quoted above, but if you pulled the first volume off the shelf and flipped through, it would have been reasonably apparent that the volume was organized by numbers assigned to authors, and happily enough, author 3 is in the first volume. I could walk up to the books and start flipping and using logic get to the correct page pretty quickly. (A student might still have been kind of intimidated by the sheer volume of information available, plus the fact that nothing is in English.)

Sorry for the blurriness of some of the iPad photos. I seem to have shaky hands. Here’s our fragment!

Now, if you did’t have a citation, but knew that you wanted a fragment of Glaukippos, or whoever, you’d turn to the Author Index in the original print set (vol. III part C pp. 947-64) and find out your author’s number, then find the correct volume for that author. So looking at the page below, Glaukippos is author number 363 and is found in vol. III part B.

For a more detailed treatment in list form of the sources of the fragments, the Bonnechard index is the right place to look. Here’s the page on our friend Author 3 (Pherekydes of Athens):

My librarian friend’s institution doesn’t subscribe to the digital Brill’s New Jacoby (which is bundled with digital versions of the original Jacoby volumes in Jacoby Online, and which is not yet complete but estimated to be so in 2017) but I was at the University of Cincinnati Library and they do, so I checked it out. A search for 3F11 netted 5 results (and unfortunately our fragment was last on the result list for some reason).

Many years ago I remember reading a prayer in a Greek tragedy that had a line something like “I’ll be satisfied if my lot is two thirds good.” I believe it was a woman bargaining with the gods during the sacking of Troy. I’m pretty sure it was one of the b-side plays that came in the same book with one of the more famous ones I had to read at [College with a strong classical tradition].

She wondered if it rang a bell to me, as despite intermittent Googling over the years she hadn’t been able to track it down. I went to Wikipedia for lists of tragedies by the Big Three (Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus) and used them to jog my memory for plays that might be set at the sack of Troy. I skimmed free online translations of Euripides’ Trojan Woman and Hecuba without any luck on day 1.

On day 2, I happened to be at the University of Cincinnati Classics Library playing with their trial of the Digital Loeb Classical Library, and kind of on a whim I constructed an Advanced Search asking for all occurrences of the phrase “two thirds” in the works of the three tragedians. (Boolean searching nerdery alert: Author = Euripides OR author = Sophocles OR author = Aeschylus AND words in text = two thirds.)

Bingo! It’s at the end of Aeschylus’ Suppliants:

So this serves as your teaser for my in-progress post about the Digital Loeb – and also a reminder of the timelessness of classical literature. As my friend wrote, “It stuck with me because it’s just such a humble and reasonable request.” I, too, hope for a life that’s two-thirds good. (And because I am not currently standing in the ruins of a sacked city, I’m feeling like I’m ahead of the game.)

I may have missed some European cities with Roman-era stuff – there are a lot of “Old City of X” (especially in Spain) and I don’t know my Roman Europe well enough to know all the cities that may have visible architecture (if I’ve missed a doozy, please say so in comments!) There are a LOT more, from multiple parts of the world; if you teach world history or art history at all, it’s well worth a scan for classroom tools. Makes me want to plan some trips!

Note that not every display or object in a given museum is included; these are generally selections from the collections. There are 290 museums in total and I haven’t looked at all of them for relevance – there are lots of large city and national museums that probably include a few items from the ancient Mediterranean. Coverage is thoroughly international, with especially good coverage of Europe, North America, and Asia. Have a look!

Last month an embarrassingly long time ago now that it’s November, I spent a day off work at the John Miller Burnam Classical Library at the University of Cincinnati, and among the errands I undertook was a look at their trial of the EBSCO interface to L’Annee Philologique. Following are my notes, keeping in mind I probably only spent an hour or two total with the database, and several things occurred to me afterwards that I did not have the ability to go back and check on. I welcome comments from others who have tested, or adopted, this interface for L’Annee.

Overall they have done a surprisingly good job of translating the quirks of L’Annee into the standard EBSCO format (when I worked at UGA, we subscribed to a large number of EBSCO databases, so I have spent a lot of time with the blue-and-green logo ball). But for those of us pretty intimately familiar with both, the mashup is kind of weird and takes some getting used to!

The BasicsThe Cincinnati trial put the user by default into the “Advanced Search” interface. In my experience, academic libraries usually get to choose where the user lands, and “Advanced Search” is a pretty obvious choice for a complex index like L’Annee. A major advantage of Advanced Search at EBSCO (and indeed at most database providers) is it nudges the user in the direction of Boolean searching by presenting 3 search boxes. They are initially connected by “AND” but there is a drop-down menu allowing the user to change to “OR” or “NOT.”

The choices of “fields” (indexes) to search from Advanced Search are as follows, with [notes in square brackets] made by me:

TX (All Text Fields) [this is the default]

TI [title, obviously]

AU [author, ditto – modern author]

RW (Author, Reviewed by)

SU [appears to search all subject headings by keyword, i.e. both of below]

DD (Subjects and Disciplines Prior to Vol. 67)

DG (Subjects and Disciplines Vol. 67 & After)

AB (Abstract)

AN (Accession Number) [N.B. these are unique numbers for each citation in the database]

AC (Ancient Authors and Texts) [note of course searching “homer” here gets you nothing – more on this below]

PE (Name of Scholar) [looks like it searches scholar’s name in subjects]

NT (Notes) [cannot figure out WHAT this is searching?!]

RS (Publication Name, Reviewed By)

DT (Publication Date)

Some of these are rather strange or opaque, as my notes indicate. While being able to search all the indexed fields available in a database is nice, in this case the labels on the fields can be misleading or simply perplexing. There are some that seem so obscure they might better have been left out, in my opinion. Most entry-level searchers may do best to stick to TX, which does a keyword search of the record (equivalent to a “full text” search in the L’Annee native interface).

What is lost here from the native interface of L’Annee is the extremely useful autofill feature for searching (modern) Authors and Ancient Authors and Texts. In the native interface, if you start typing “hom” in the box when searching Ancient Authors and Texts, you will automatically be directed to a list of possible matches, which usefully demonstrates that “homer” is not indexed but “homerus” is (in L’Annee, all ancient authors and texts are indexed under their latin names.)

The EBSCO interface does attempt to replicate these useful features by allowing the user to browse some of the indexes – accessed by More -> Indexes. Browsing the Ancient Authors and Texts index does not include the autofill feature, however, and there’s no “did you mean” feature here, leading to what I call the classic “Juvenal Fail” in L’Annee:

Imagine how boggled an undergraduate would be by this! And there’s no help text to tell you to try the latin name. Browsing for a modern author is less likely to result in failure:

One can also browse the Archaeological Site index, which is very useful for archaeologists, once you get over the hurdle that the site names are all exclusively in French and must be browsed by the strict format “country (site name)”. So my test of “ath” to try to see what Athens was indexed as brought me sites in Austria:

One can also browse the two Subjects and Disciplines indexes, and these operate exactly as in the native interface, where one can expand the broad terms by clicking to reach deeper levels of the subject classification.

Good Things
L’Annee in its native interface abbreviates the titles of journals, which only expand when hovered over with the cursor. In the EBSCO interface journal titles are expanded by default, but abbreviations are also included, and can be searched interchangeably with the full titles. I tested a search for “aja” and found it returned the same results as a search for “american journal of archaeology.” Yay!

Things I Might Change
The EBSCO interface is in English, of course, but subject headings that appear (i.e. in the sidebar to facet a search after it’s been made, and in individual records, see image below) appear in both French and English (duplicates), which I can see as confusing and/or off-putting to undergraduates who are wary of languages they don’t know. This seems a strange choice – why not simply include the English translations and leave out the French originals?

Another EBSCO feature included in this version of L’Annee is the suggestion of alternative search terms when a search returns few/no results, displaying “did you mean…”. I found this only appeared some of the time – perhaps the less common vocabulary of classics sometimes stumped EBSCO’s recommender – and when it did appear was sometimes useful and sometimes not. (This is not a problem unique to L’Annee – at one point I had a small collection of wildly irrelevant things databases would suggest to me I ‘might have meant’.) Overall, in assessing whether this feature added value or complicated matters, I might well have chosen to leave it off.

Recommendations
Who might consider purchasing L’Annee through EBSCO in addition to the native L’Annee interface, adding L’Annee at EBSCO when they do not subscribe to the native interface, or switching? Factors will vary at different institutions. For starters, I have no information about price. Anecdotally, I heard from one person that the EBSCO interface was more expensive than the native, and from another person, the reverse. (This is by no means unlikely – pricing for library subscription databases is generally not transparent, and will vary according to the size and classification of the institution as well as local and/or consortial deals involving purchase of multiple products from a given vendor.)

A second question to consider is who uses L’Annee. In my anecdotal experience, faculty use it occasionally to rarely – they tend to conduct research by bibliographic chaining out from known items, and looking for new publications by scholars whose work they already know. Graduate students, especially PhD students, are probably the heaviest users, given their need to move from a position of little knowledge on a subject to mastery of it, often including a full historical literature review. Graduate students also have a minor tendency to become obsessed with bibliographic completeness (raise your hand if this is you.) In my experience, undergraduates are generally slow to be exposed to L’Annee, even those majoring in Classics at top-ranked institutions. They are unlikely to be using it at all unless a librarian or faculty member has both recommended it and taken the time to demonstrate its value. The EBSCO interface might make L’Annee an easier sell for undergraduates – since after all, you can plop “homer” into a keyword search box that looks pretty standard and get (some) results. Grad students and faculty are more likely to resist change, and in my opinion the EBSCO interface doesn’t add anything valuable enough to the native one to be a dealbreaker.

A third question is, does your institution already subscribe to a large number of EBSCO databases, and is your library promoting a unified search of the local catalog and subscription databases (like GIL-Find/Multi-Search at UGA or Summon at Cincinnati)? If you’re already heavily EBSCO, you’ll likely get a better price, and your students will already feel pretty comfortable with the look and feel of EBSCO. More classics-themed results will be included in a catalog-and-database combined search. That might make switching worth it.

Who else has had a trial of the EBSCO version of L’Annee? What was your evaluation, and what has your institution chosen to do?

(I wanted to title this post “What I did on my summer vacation,” but I figured that would not be very helpful for the search engines out there.)

In July I had the privilege of spending 10 days teaching a workshop on information fluency in classical studies at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC. It was an incredible luxury to explore a topic in such depth, when in the past I have had at most an hour and a half to reach a group of students! I am very grateful to Kenny Morrell, who invited me to teach this class; Lanah Koelle, our program coordinator/librarian who contributed her expertise at every stage; Allie Marby, CHS’s summer interns, and librarians Temple Wright and Erika Bainbridge, who attended sessions and supported us at CHS, especially in the library; and most especially the workshop students, who gracefully accepted their role as guinea pigs and taught me a great deal. The students were a mixture on American undergraduates and Greek professionals in education and information fields; each brought an inquisitive spirit and their collective hard work and openness to sharing and new ideas was a major factor in the success of the workshop. Thank you!

As a group we assembled some resources that others who are interested in this topic may find useful. The first is a Zotero group library with folders that list the session topics. Each folder’s contents include citations for assigned readings for the session (usually fairly short, web-based readings) and citations for information resources we discussed during the session.

So, blogging a project that didn’t work – good idea or not? Let’s see…

The project was to get the content of the TOCS-IN citation database into the free, open-access bibliographic software Zotero (which David Pettegrew discusses today; his post kicked me over my hesitation about blogging this project). I wanted to do this for two reasons: to draw increased attention to TOCS-IN, which is an excellent, open-access bibliographic resource for Classicists, and make it especially accessible to Zotero users; and to make the TOCS-IN content potentially available as Linked Open Data, because Zotero can export files in BIBO, a linked open data format for bibliographic citations.

My steps were:

1. Get permission from P.M.W. Matheson of the University of Toronto, the manager of the volunteer-driven TOCS-IN project, to use the available data files for this purpose. She was helpful and supportive – thank you!

2. Write a Python script to convert the data file formatting from a custom SGML markup to RIS format, a common format for bibliographic citations (used by Zotero as well as EndNote, which created it.) I am not a programmer, but happily my husband is; this piece would not have been possible without his help, although I did big chunks of it All By Myself.

3. Add the RIS-formatted citations to a Zotero Group library. This turned out to be the problem. In theory, there is no limit to the number of bibliographic citations that can be stored by a Zotero user. In practice, once I got about 40,000 (of the ca. 80,000) citations uploaded my Zotero standalone software began freezing every time I attempted to do anything (like stubbornly add another several thousand citations), and refusing to sync with the online Group Library. A question posted in the Zotero forums got the swift and helpful confirmation that the sync process simply cannot handle such large datasets well, and that I alone would not be affected; any users who tried to use this large group library would start crashing their Zotero instances as well.

What now?

It’s possible that Zotero, which is actively under development, will make it possible to create very large citation libraries. Zotero used to not be able to handle a couple of thousand citations in one library, and now it can do that with ease (as, for example, the ASCSA Group Library of 2553 items demonstrates). But it may not be a priority for Zotero’s developers to move in that direction; most people use Zotero for personal citation libraries, not as de facto mirror sites for large bibliographic indices.

I have looked at BibSoup/BibServer, related projects that allow the open-access presentation of bibliographic data online, deal with a wide variety of formats (bibtex, MARC, RIS, BibJSON, RDF), and are relevant to the Linked Open Data goal of this project (full RESTful API). I really liked Zotero simply because it is already very popular with humanities-oriented users and likely to become more so (it seems especially popular among graduate students). BibSoup is geared toward STEM academics, and currently only has about 17,000 citations total (and I’m a little hesitant about breaking things after my Zotero experience!); BibServer requires a server and IT chops which I lack. I do think these applications have a lot of potential, but I don’t think they will work for my project right now. I’d welcome an argument on this point, or any other suggestions.

Finally, I’d like to add a quick recap and appreciation of what TOCS-IN is and comprises. TOCS-IN is a bibliographic database that is fully open-access (searchable at Toronto and at Louvain) and entirely crowd-sourced – that is to say, made possible by the contributions of volunteers who transcribe or copy and paste journal tables of contents and format them for inclusion in the database. A list of volunteers is available at the site, as is a list of journals currently needing a volunteer. Do consider joining us; I am currently covering three journals, and the time burden is minimal, especially if the journal publishes its table of contents online (much less typing!)

Blake Landor, the Classics, Philosophy, Religion and General Humanities Librarian at the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, has just announced the availability of a set of open-access MARC records for the PHI Classical Latin Texts online (formerly on widely-used CD-Rom).

Anyone wanting a view of the way the records look in UF’s catalog can search for ‘Packard Humanities Institute’ in the online catalog: http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/

Landor thanks Chuck Jones and Karen Green for their support of his project, which was funded by an internal mini-grant, but clearly the biggest thanks are due to Landor for his initiative and public service. Kudos! Librarians, get ‘em in your catalogs ASAP!